From AD 1200 to 1500, a pottery style called Koriabo appeared in most parts of Northern Amazonia, including the Guianas and the Lower Amazon. Such ceramics were displayed persistence in the Caribbean by the time of the first colonial enterprises, in settlements dated between the 16th and 17th centuries in the Lesser Antilles, understood as related to the Kalinago peoples. Despite its distribution over a vast territory, the homogeneity of decorative forms and vessel shapes is a striking characteristic of such ceramics, whose radiocarbon datings mostly range from AD 1000 to 1500 in Amazonia. Some have raised that Koriabo pottery should be understood as one of the archaeological correlates of the Carib-speaking peoples, due to its presence being matched with places historically occupied by them. On the other hand, others agree that such assemblage is a phenomenon more related to the making of long-distance exchange networks. The hypothesis raised here advocates that Koriabo could be explained by a two-folded process, which includes the making and reproduction of exchange networks, as well as demic diffusion. While the first process is related to the concept of “cultural transmission”, the second one is translated into substantial population movements. Such expansions probably occurred at a rapid rhythm and created more homogeneous patterns of archaeological visibility. One of the archaeological models for Carib-language expansion points out that the last expansion step was initiated by AD 1000 when the growth of population and the strengthening of exchange networks provoked a diasporic movement towards the regions known by the time of first colonial encounters. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these ideas by using GIS and time-series modeling of radiocarbon dates.
Keywords: Koriabo Pottery, Amazonia, Carib-speaking peoples, Exchange Networks, Demic Diffusion
library(tidyverse)
library(rcarbon)
library(rnaturalearth)
library(sf)
library(prettymapr)
library(knitr)
library(leaflet)
library(leaflet.extras)
library(sp)
library(rgdal)
library(magrittr)
This document is intended to show only the code and plot results of the radiocarbon modeling for Koriabo pottery, made up by means of the rcarbon package. It does not contain interpretation for the archaeological analysis.
# Loadding required shapefiles
koriaboPottery <- sf::read_sf("data_raw/koriabo.shp", crs = 4326) # Shapefile for the distribution of Koriabo pottery
caribanLanguages <- sf::read_sf("data_raw/cariban_languages.shp", crs = 4326) # Shapefile for the distribution of Cariban Languages
ethnomies <- sf::read_sf("data_raw/group_ethnomies.shp", crs = 4326) # Shapefile for group ethnomies base on Nimuendaju's map
water <- sf::read_sf("data_raw/sa_water.shp", crs = 4326) # Shapefile of Hydrography
world <- rnaturalearth::ne_countries(scale = 'medium', type = 'map_units', returnclass = 'sf') # Loading world layer vector
dated_sites <- read.csv("data_raw/dated_sites.csv") %>% #Dates sites with Koriabo Pottery
st_as_sf(
coords = c(2, 3),
crs = 4326
)
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